“She Must Have Done Something Quite Extraordinary Indeed”: Gender Politics of the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday in Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur
Nandini Dhar
On March 7, 1943, in an article entitled “Women of All Classes Unite to Solve Food Crisis and Demand Gandiji’s Release,” People’s War, the organ of the undivided Communist Party of India, commented that the women of Bengal and Punjab, who had remained “backward” despite the “revolutionary activities of the men of Bengal and the Punjab,” were finally being politicized because of their “realization” that they were “facing utter destruction of family life itself.” The article followed a Party meeting in the Howrah district of Bengal attended by 1,500 women from “backward villages.” The essay described women’s political subjectivities as “backward” precisely because they remain tied to the private space – the home, the domestic realm. Their presence in a specific kind of a public space – the Party’s political assembly – thus demanded inscription and theorization in the Party press. Yet even when they left that private space behind, women’s political subjectivities, the essay concludes, were still tied to the domesticity of “family life”. This domesticity remained undertheorized and inaccessible to the political language of a Second World War-era Marxist/Communist activism, pitted as it was within the genocidal famine of 1943, the everyday realities of imperial governance, and the general crisis-ridden global environment of World War II.
Yet there is nothing novel in this essay’s ambivalent treatment of domesticity as such. Domesticity, as many scholars remind us, is a crucial category in Bengali/Indian nationalism, whose hypervisibility lead political scientist and subaltern studies scholar Partha Chatterjee to write, “[…] anti-colonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains – the material and the spiritual” (217). The material, Chatterjee continues, is the sphere of the state, the economy, the science – the “public” as such. The spiritual remains the “inner” domain – the “private” sphere. Chatterjee concludes, “The colonial state, in other words, is kept out of the “inner” domain of national culture, but it is not as though this so-called spiritual domain is left unchanged” (217). There is a significant spatial metaphor at work in Chatterjee’s analysis, which should draw our attention to the quotidian, material practices that transform the private sphere – the home, to be precise – into a “spiritual” and “sovereign” realm of the indigenous nationalisms. Chatterjee duly notes the fact that such practices radically transform the lives of women. But as a scholar, he is less interested in the micro-social minutiae of such processes than in the discursive framework wherein the private sphere is made into a central premise within Indian/Bengali nationalism.
Communist rhetoric is obviously radically different from the nationalist one, given that a crucial aspect of its political critique is directed against the indigenous elites which nationalism brings into being. Yet in the People’s War article cited above, the “threatened” family-life – the private sphere – was as central to the Bengali/Indian Communist theorization as it was to hegemonic nationalism. Whereas in the latter, the category of “culture” manifested in such terms as “Westernization” becomes central, in leftist thought the “economy” takes its place. Yet the Indian/Bengali Communist thought of the era also records a paradox. This is the fact that the economy is defined in terms of the nation, thus leading the former to predicate itself upon nationalism’s modes of representation. The article is a prime example of this phenomenon. Literary scholar Ania Loomba reminds us, “Communist self-fashioning did not take place in an ideological or social space of its own. Especially when it came to questions of gender and sexuality, communists were as deeply influenced by nationalist ideas and practices as they were by Marxist or revolutionary ones; indeed, the former provided the lens through which they viewed and appropriated later.”
The essay from People’s War shows that the Communist rhetoric of the 1940s, in its effort to link the economy and the “destruction of the family life,” transformed the private sphere into a material space, thus debunking its purported “spiritual/ cultural” status within mainstream nationalist thought. There is also an element in the latter which explicitly associates the private sphere – the “family life” as such – with the lives of women, thus feminizing it. The ideology of domesticity thus comes to occupy an ambivalent and ambiguous quality in Communist thought. Domestic space, even when conjoined with larger political and economic imperatives, remains a monosexual realm, wherein women are seen as “naturally” tied to domesticity.
The ambivalence in the Bengali and Indian Communist approach to domesticity is a prominent feature in leftist-communist women’s literary productions, in both autobiographies as well as fiction. This is exemplified by Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur (A Seedling’s Tale), a leftist-feminist novel written in 1956 which deserves wider appreciation as one of the canonic texts of the late 20th century. Nabankur is a female bildungsroman which demonstrates that Bengali female Communist selfhood, in the years just prior to India’s 1947 independence, could only be formed through a complex negotiation with the idea of domesticity as an ideology. This negotiation involved the evolution of what I would call a notion of “public domesticity,” which became the space from which upper-caste, middle-class Bengali women participated within the public realm of left political radicalism.
This public domesticity can best be described as a state of being, an ideology, a descriptive category that is “of the home” but not necessarily confined to the home, and can very well be transplanted into the spaces of public production, activism and left political identities and organizations. In Nabankur, as in many of the other literary productions by leftist women, such negotiations and practices were often spatial in nature, and linked specific ideological and political struggles with quotidian struggles over alternative spaces which were neither family, nor spaces of economic production.
Consequently, Nabankur shows how domesticity within the Communist movement functioned as an amorphous idea that was simultaneously rejected, embodied and practiced – an exercise that had an immense effect on the lives of Communist women as well as their sense of personhood. In fact, domestic ideology in Sanyal’s novel appears as a form of affective gendered belonging. Put simply, Nabankur demonstrates there is a “bad domesticity” and a “good domesticity”, the former embodied in the relationships Chhobi shares with her family, and the latter the relationships generated within the realms and spaces of the Communist Party structures. It is through her presence within the spaces of leftist organizing that Chhobi accesses left-political values closely associated with the home and the homely.
Whereas Ania Loomba has argued that Nabankur “foregrounds her battles within the fold of the family” while “de-centering” the female protagonist’s political struggles in the world outside, I argue the politics of both the “home” and the “world” are inextricably interrelated in the novel. In order to participate in political struggles with the outside world, the protagonist must wage incessant battles within the home space. Sanyal’s politics of the home space diverges from classical Marxism’s inattention to domestic space, but also dissents from second-wave feminism’s critique of the former. In fact, I argue the novel focuses on a spatial politics and specific acts of political place-making.
In the language of the social and cultural geographers, the female protagonist of Nabankur makes use of Communist Party spaces strategically, constructing and interpreting these latter as spaces which are both independent of her own personal struggles, but also interwoven with the latter. Such place-making activities were part of activist women’s claims to the public, political spaces of the left. But they were also constituted by women’s everyday spatial practices and resistances. Place-making thus operated as a significant element of a Communist woman’s political agency. Nabankur’s careful attention to spatial politics defamiliarizes the notion that the Communist subjectivity of the era was gender-neutral.
The Methodological Problems
Scholars have pointed out how “much conventional historiography has ignored the role of women and even communist movement histories have blurred the distinctive attempts women members have made to create a gendered space for themselves by creating a discourse of class that is blind to patriarchy.” (Marik 81). Ania Loomba notes, “[…] the significant contributions of communist activists have not been accorded appropriate space in accounts of Indian feminism.” Loomba astutely observes that scholars of the subcontinental radical past have often tended to avoid the crucial material, ideological and discursive space of the Communist Party, focusing instead on individual non-party Marxists. She attributes this “partly because of their [the Party’s]declining political fortunes in recent years and partly because they are associated with sorry narratives of political compromise as well as an unimaginative, and at times outright hostile, approach to questions of feminist agency and sexuality.” Indeed, many studies of modern South Asian literature have employed the theoretical lens of “postcolonial studies”, wherein little attention was paid to categories of class, class-based mobilizations, and the cultural productions they produced. Texts with close associations with organized communist politics remain especially understudied, precisely because they do not fit neatly into the paradigms of footloose transnationalism, diaspora studies or identity-politics prevalent in postcolonial studies. Additionally, much of the post-structuralist theory that informed postcolonial studies often contributed to a dismissal of subcontinental activist Marxisms and the cultures they engendered as “archaic,” “essentialist” or “pedantic.”
There are inevitable complexities involved in reading, categorizing, and analysing texts and writers whose relationship to the Bengali literary mainstream has remained problematic and ambivalent. This is best demonstrated by the absence of these texts from Bengal’s otherwise quite extensive literary marketplace, in spite of a left government holding political power in the state of West Bengal for thirty-four years (1977-2011). For long periods of time, Sanyal’s works were housed almost exclusively either with her family or private collections of individual left-leaning readers, writers and intellectuals.
Women were often cast by the popular left-cultural imaginary as performers — the voice in the chorus, the untrained young middle-class woman who became a skilled dancer within the confines of left cultural movements, the skilled actress who delivered lines written by others on stage. Without trivializing what these performances meant both for the women’s movements in India and leftist movements at large, the theoretical-literary imagination of the Indian/Bengali left has retained a default masculinity as the fulcrum of cultural creativity and activism. This gendered nature is reflected in the paucity of critical discussions of the literary productions of the women on the left, an absence also apparent in academic literary criticism, where thorough analyses and studies of progressive women writers are rare. While a few writers, such as Ismat Chughtai, who wrote in Urdu, haves received considerable attention within South Asian Literary Studies, more exhaustive studies of leftist women writers from the subcontinent still need to be undertaken.
Scholars such as Paula Rabinowitz have shown that the purported gender-neutral rhetoric of Communist and/or leftist personhood has often erased women’s specific experiences from the symbolic boundaries of discussions of Communist subjectivity. The rhetoric of what Rabinowitz terms the “gender-neutral subjectivity” of the left emerged from the utopian egalitarianism embodied in figures such as the “Communist,”, the “socialist,”, the “committed” artist, and so on. At the same time, the lived experiences of many men and women revealed that left organizations could not do away with gender, class, caste or other forms of inequalities within their everyday practices. These structures reinscribed such hierarchies, even as serious efforts were being made to resist them. For women writers who operated mostly inside the cultural spaces generated by the left, this co-existence of contradictory impulses contributed to their erasure from both the left public sphere and the larger literary public. Consequently, the figure of the “leftist” and/or “committed” writer was almost always associated with a masculine selfhood.
Yet Sanyal’s memory was kept alive – often in fragmentary forms – in feminist anthologies and zines. I first encountered excerpts from Sanyal’s novel Nabankur in the pages of the anthology Women’s Writing in India, during the early years of the twenty-first century. Later, I read an excerpt from the novel in a Marxist-feminist little magazine called Khoj (The Quest), edited by Krishna Bandopadhyay, the prominent Naxal feminist. It was from Bandopadhyaya, who happened to be a friend, that I acquired a photocopy of the novel.
It was not until 2007 that a medium-sized publisher from Kolkata republished Nabankur, along with multiple short-stories, another novel, and three unfinished novels, one of which was a sequel of Nabankur. Signalling Sanyal’s potential canonization, this republication provides an occasion to rethink the circulation of leftist women’s texts both within activist sub-cultures as well as the larger reading public.
Locating Sulekha Sanyal
Sulekha Sanyal was born in 1928 in a village called Korokdi in the district of Faridpur in undivided Bengal, what is now Bangladesh. Much like the family described in Nabankur, Sanyal was born into a family of feudal elites, which, by the time Sanyal was born, had lost its earlier affluence. Sanyal came to Kolkata at the age of 20, participated in what is known as the Food Movement (Khadya Andolon) in 1959, and spent a brief stint in prison. A member of the Communist Party of India, Sanyal also married one of her comrades, Chitta Biswas, a full-time Party activist. Although never formally divorced, the couple became estranged within a few years of their marriage. Sanyal also had a relationship with the writer and translator of Russian, Nani Bhaumik. The failure of this relationship is often cited as the reason for her deteriorating health and early death in 1962 at the age of 34. Nabankur was written when Sanyal was 26, in the middle of her disintegrating marriage.
The plot of Nabankur follows the story of Chhobi, the protagonist, as she grows up from an unkempt, articulate little girl into a rebellious young woman. Its main characters typify the major developments of early twentieth century Bengali history. Chhobi is born into a family of impoverished zamindaris (rural landlords). One of her uncles is imprisoned by the British because he is a “revolutionary terrorist”, and when he leaves prison, becomes a Communist. Chhobi receives her first political lessons from this uncle, and continues to do so until his death from tuberculosis. There are also her grandmothers, great-aunts and aunts, who represent feudal femininity and who lead claustrophobic, traumatic and victimized lives. For a few years, Chhobi leaves the village with an aunt and her husband so that she can receive a proper education. Living in a nearby town with her aunt and uncle, Chhobi experiences the Gandhian form of the freedom struggle taught by a woman who is a Gandhian herself, befriends the children of a Christian family, witnesses urban poverty, and discovers that her aunt and uncle suffer from an unhappy marriage (her uncle loves another woman). As the wartime crisis intensifies, Chhobi is sent back to the village where she becomes absorbed in the relief-efforts undertaken by the Communist Party of India. While living in the village, Chhobi refuses to be arm-twisted into an arranged marriage, and eventually becomes an activist. She passes her school-leaving exam and leaves for Kolkata for higher education to join her brother, who is already there, training to be an artist. The novel also depicts Chhobi’s constant fights with her family-members, her budding romance with Tamal, another young activist, the ways in which wartime crises affect her family, the “condition” of the other women in the village, and the peasant rebellion brewing in the background. The result is a compelling personal and political account of the social history of modern Bengal between the 1920s and 1940s.
The Politics of Home and Domesticity in Nabankur
Sanyla turns the “home,” that crucial category of Bengali nationalism, into a concrete, material space characterized by numerous everyday cultural practices and labour. Sanyal intervenes within the field of Bengali women’s domestic fiction via two interrelated strategies. First, she moves away from the trope of the suffering, violated female protagonist, who is ultimately rescued by the male lover and marital heteronormativity. Second, she writes obsessively of the moments of Chhobi’s leaving, none of which are tied to romantic love and/or marriage. The space of the nuclear family is critiqued in the novel in the form of Chhobi witnessing her aunt and uncle’s unhappy marriage. It would be incorrect to state that Nabankur is devoid of representations of women feeling claustrophobic within domestic spaces. Rather, Chhobi observes and critically reflects on the impact of this claustrophobia on the women around her, creating a spatial and ideological distance between herself and the kind of domesticity that creates such distress.
If there is anything separating Chhobi from the women around her, it is her rage. Bengali nationalism typically represented women as victimized and passive subjects awaiting deliverance, most notably in figurations of Bharat Mata (Mother India)—the nation-mother. By contrast, Chhobi’s rage marks her femininity as beyond the realm of suffering. As a protagonist, her rage marks her as someone destined to become an exceptional woman.
What Chhobi wants to become has no precedent in the social world that surrounds her. Thus, the novel records a range of anxieties in its protagonist which far exceed the trope of female restlessness or domestic claustrophobia typical of modern Bengali literature. One such anxiety is how to embody the ideal of a Communist vanguard as a woman — or more precisely, how a Hindu, upper-caste, upper-class woman can become an autonomous political subject.
Unlike the conventional female bildungsroman’s writing of the marriage as the ultimate climax of the female protagonist’s journey, Chhobi’s quest is centered on something much more nebulous and abstract – a political selfhood. A central element of this selfhood is the quest for a language to represent the making of the female Communist self in terms of quotidian material political practices.
Scholars of the gender politics of the Communist movement in India argue the ideological, political and cultural ethos of the Communist Party lead to complicated and contradictory gendered formations. For example, the insignificance accorded to questions of social identity within the discursive formation of Communist selfhood led to a symbolic space of de-gendering, which gave women the ideological and discursive space to question the normative constraints of gender. Yet this de-gendering often proved incapable of analysing or resisting more subtle constellations of patriarchy, both within the home and the world at large.
Critical Domestic Geography and the Crumbling Feudal Home
By writing a critical geography of Chhobi’s ancestral home, Nabankur depicts the feudal household as a site of affect that is simultaneously political and personal. The home is represented as a conglomeration of broken structures, literally on the verge of collapse. It inspires complicated emotions in Chhobi: “A kind of shiver ran down her spine whenever she peeped through the broken panes of those derelict rooms and saw the huge wooden chest, the clotheshorse hanging by thick ropes from the rafters, the termite-eaten stools, the heaps of rubble all over the floor and the rusty lock hanging on the door.” As she would watch this dilapidated structure, Chhobi would think to herself, “Thakuma said the house was a hundred years old. How could such an old house survive? Surely the whole house would come crashing down one day. Not just one or two bricks here and there, but all of it, at one go. Then only a few broken bricks would remain, scattered around the spot, like that kuthibari over there.”
The ancestral home remains an important element of Chhobi’s own spatial, political and geographic emotional landscape. It is precisely in observing this conglomeration of objects and structures on the edge of ruin, barely held together by what French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau calls “spatial practice” – everyday practices through which material places are translated into language, representation, and ideology — that Chhobi learns to “read” meaning into what is seemingly a neutral entity. These readings transform the home into an unhomely entity – an uncomfortable and uncanny assemblage of broken structures and objects.
This assemblage disrupts and disturbs. What was supposed to house nationalism’s much-mythologized “inner” and “spiritual” realm is a pile of wreckage so quotidian and mundane, nobody even thinks to clean it up. By witnessing this assemblage of ruins through Chhobi’s eyes, the novel critiques a decaying Bengali feudalism as well as the failure of nationalism to generate a gender politics beyond feudal nostalgia. Sanyal’s novel underlines the ways in which the feudal, zamindari household has formed a textual, spatial fulcrum in Bengali literature in general, as well as in Bengali literature’s representations of nationalism — most notably, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Ghare-Baire (Home and the World), where one of the protagonists, Bimala, leaves the threshold of the ontohpur (the domestic sphere), prodded by her liberal husband Nikhilesh, who is himself a zamindar.
Nationalism’s domestic allegory exists in the novel as a broken allegory, as the shards of a ruin. Markers of decaying feudalism are everywhere in Nabankur – in divided landholdings, in the divided family, in Chhobi’s fathers and uncles gradually accepting “modern” jobs such as teaching and shop-keeping, and in the migration of other branches of the family to the cities. The novel powerfully conveys a sense of an impending, not-yet-completed modernity. Chhobi’s quest remains suspended between her vague awareness of a crumbling feudal past, which also happens to be her present, and an uncertain future.
Nabankur thus records a double crisis of domesticity: that of a Bengali, rural landowning feudalism that colonial capitalism has rendered unviable, and that of a nationalism unable to reach beyond a modernized semi-feudalism. Neither can grant autonomous political subjectivity to Chhobi. It is through this double crisis that a left-Communist possibility is hinted at in this novel. That possibility, abstract as it is, is what constitutes Chhobi’s present. Cultural theorist of space Edward Soja writes, “We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideologies.” Women experience the home not as the idealized and romanticized “inner” realm of Bengali/Indian nationalism, but as a space of compulsory belonging. It is a space where they are compelled to live and labor, and often associated with memories of intense violence and violation. In doing so, the novel critiques the gendered assumptions of 19th and early 20th century Bengali nationalist rhetoric. In many ways, the novel identifies domesticity as violence.
As feminist cultural geographer Doreen Massey comments, “Space is not absolute, it is relational,” thus implicating the former in an integral relationship to time. Chhobi’s present is constituted by what happens inside the crumbling mansion: the stifled cries of the aunt who is being beaten by her husband every day, the gossip about that aunt’s fate the next morning between her mother, other aunts and her grandmother, and her grandmother’s retort that “[m]en are always a bit like that, it is only natural.”
The (feudal) domestic interiority, for Chhobi, is constituted primarily by domestic violence and its normalization. Domesticity is also the quantifiable labour that women perform inside their homes, as is evident in the work Chhobi’s mother performs in the kitchen which makes it impossible for her children to have emotional access to her during the day. As Sanyal writes, “Ma hardly spoke all day long, she was so busy. She would be getting up any time now, to go to the ghat for a bath, then into the kitchen. They wouldn’t see her again until late at night. She went to bed very late.” Spaces of labour dominate the women’s domestic calendar, something most prominent in that prototypical space of normalized gendered labour, the kitchen.
Domesticity becomes tangible in the marks it leaves on women’s bodies, e.g. Chhobi’s mother’s darkening skin and the rows of red heat rashes on her back, accrued from spending too much time inside a tiny kitchen. Domesticity becomes the scars on her grandmother’s feet, the result of hot rice-pots spilling on her feet when she was barely a young bride of nine. Domesticity is felt in the headaches her great-aunts and aunts suffer from. Domestic and culinary labour is a form of quotidian structural violence that subjects women’s bodies to permanent debilitation.
Almost all of the women’s bodies are as broken as the house where Chhobi lives. Yet domesticity is also constituted in the unquantifiable pain of being confined to the restricted world of the feudal home, causing women and girls to lead shrunken mental and intellectual lives and leaving them incapable of thinking of themselves as independent subjects. Domesticity within this home is also enacted in and through more tangible occurrences, like the amount of food the women in the family eat. As Chhobi observes, “The whole household had finished eating, but they were still stuck in the kitchen so late in the afternoon. Often the food would be finished and after serving everyone they would have to boil more rice before they could eat. No curry or vegetables would be left to go with the rice; they would mop the sides of the curry bowl with rice for what remained of the gravy.”
There are innumerable examples of such material, spiritual and intellectual shrinkage throughout the book – girls’ educations cut short, forced marriages, bad marriages, and the nameless, inchoate discontent internalized and normalized by the women themselves. To be a woman, the novel shows, irrespective of class, is to lead a damaged existence inside the domestic space. Domesticity for Mamata, Chhobi’s mother, means a thwarted and stunted artistic life: “Ma would recite poetry sometimes, but only if they begged her to. She could sing too, but never did. Married women were not supposed to sing. Thakuma called her names sometimes, ‘A bibi from the town,’ ‘a memsahib.’”
“Ghastly Spectacle” of the Famine: The Complicated Intersections of Class and Gender
The organizational space where Chhobi found her political place is the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS). During the 1943 Bengal famine, the Communist Party undertook a campaign to open relief kitchens, led mostly by middle-class women activists. Peasant women were also encouraged to agitate against extortionate rice prices and for fair-price ration shops. Such actions led to the opening of sixteen fair price shops. Ania Loomba writes, “It was out of such political efforts that communist women had the idea of setting up a women’s organization that would not be limited to educated or rich women, as was the case with the All India Women’s Congress, the first major women’s organization in India in which communist women also worked. Hence the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS) was born.” Nabankur documents the everyday realities and materialities of the spaces that MARS built, the relief kitchen being the most prominent example.
It shows how the Party-led relief kitchen is a political space wherein differently classed bodies experience personal frictions, friendships, solidarities and intimacies. Space and class thus become crucial sites in Chhobi’s developing political subjectivity.
The “ghastly spectacle” of the famine comes suddenly to Chhobi one afternoon. As soon as she sits down for lunch with her mother and aunt, a crowd of famished peasants gathers in the family courtyard begging for rice gruel (phaan). Chhobi, unable to eat, think or read afterwards, held back her tears and left the threshold of the household. What is striking is how Sanyal employs spatial metaphors to describe Chhobi’s nascent understanding of class inequalities and class politics. Chhobi ruminates that in order to find the Communist activists of the village, whom, she already knows through her uncle, and who she thinks, will be able to provide her with solutions, she will have to “walk through the village in full view of the people in order to get to them, and that she would not be allowed to do.” Her desire for a political resolution clashes with the spatial restrictions of her life at home.
Chhobi leaves anyway. When she walks out of the home, “through the mango grove, beyond the pond” onto the open fields stretching to the horizon, Chhobi creates her own transgressive geography that uncannily intersects with the landscape of the famine. She sees dry and cracked fields, over which “crawled hordes of humans. They moved about, ducking their heads, now up, now down. Were they searching for something? […] Then she realized what those people were doing. They were scrounging the banks for roots and leaves – shaluk, kolmi – and crabs and snails.” The novel thus creates an affective landscape of famine wherein gendered discontent over domestic confinement and classed precarity intersect and inform each other. Chhobi’s traversal of the domestic threshold interlinks the issues of class inequalities, economic deprivation, and class struggle, such that empathy for the classed “other” thus becomes a central element in Chhobi’s feminist awakening.
At one point, a procession of peasants arrives led by Tamal, one of the young Communist organizers. Tamal informs Chhobi they are going to the administrative office to demand a relief kitchen. He recognizes that Chhobi will be punished by her family for leaving the boundaries of her home, and requests her to deliver a message to her uncle that “we’ve been able to rally most of the villagers for the march.” Tellingly, he does not invite her to join the march: “Chhobi nodded but remained where she was, still looking at the marchers moving on. No one had asked her to join in – all she was good for was carrying messages.”
This moment is one of the constitutive moments in the novel, wherein Chhobi attempts to create her own transgressive geography by refusing to adhere to the domestic spatial organization of the feudal patriarchal family, but also by foregrounding the incapacity of the male Communist organizers to make that gendered domestic geography an integral element of their politics. Tamal sympathizes with Chhobi’s predicament, but does not know how to devise a plan enabling her to bypass or confront her family. Neither does he inspire her to do so. When she joins the rally by “looking straight ahead,” she creates a notion of spatial belonging for herself which does not depend upon the approval of the Party’s male leadership. This is the moment which gives birth to an evolving gendered Communist subjectivity, within which class and gender will interact in complex and complementary ways. But there is also an excess in the spatiality Chhobi creates for herself, an excess that cannot be accommodated within the Party’s male leadership’s understanding of the roles assigned to women in the movement.
The true significance of this moment is revealed when Chhobi walks back home to find her father waiting for her with a cane in his hand:
When she had joined the procession in the morning, shouting slogans, she had noticed the startled looks of the spectators and the women whispering to one another, but the possible consequences of her actions hadn’t even occurred to her. But now, seeing her father and grandfather waiting there, boiling with rage, unbathed and unfed still, it struck her suddenly like a hammer in her heart, that she must have done something quite extraordinary indeed.
This “extra-ordinary” thing is to break through the notion of familial honour or izzat, which remains tied to both class and gender, and is predicated upon a naturalized, spatial association between femininity and compulsory domesticity.
There is, then, an essential political subtext in Sanyal’s writing of Chhobi and her transgressions. For a woman of a feudal family to claim her liberation as a woman, she must engage with class as a category. How she places herself within the ongoing materialities of the class struggle becomes one of the most significant elements of her political coming-of-age. In the novel, Chhobi finds refuge within the spaces and activities of the Communist Party. This resolves a tension that lies at the heart of the Bengali female bildungsroman of the era. This is the entangled question of the “new” woman’s role within both the reformulated public and private spheres. This is resolved in Nabankur by making the Communist Party the space granting the “new” modern woman a social space as well as political citizenship. While the Communist Party evolved from Bengal’s colonial-capitalist modernity, it is exceptional in its capacity to accommodate women like Chhobi. This accommodation also involves a complicated renegotiation of the norms of domesticity, especially those tied to the Communist Party’s political practices.
Ideology of Domesticity
Ania Loomba has pointed out that many everyday practices of the Communist Party – living in communes, contract marriages, the involvement of women in arduous organizing – put enormous pressure on conventional notions of family and domesticity. Indeed, Sanyal’s novel never loses sight of the fact that radical left politics amounted to a dissociation from one’s domestic and familial duties. One of Chhobi’s uncles, formerly a nationalist, comments to her about the Communist organizers and activists: “Those boys are a real good lot. People complain that they don’t stay at home, they don’t take care of their parents– perhaps there’s some truth in that. But it is also true that they have hearts of gold.”
Yet there is also the absence of a political language by which to theorize this dissociation. The uncle voices a kind of collective social confusion vis-a-vis Communist politics, even as he attempts to grapple with its social ramifications. There is a lack of clarity in his articulation about lived Communist practices and its critique of family and domesticity within Bengali society. The uncle’s comments reveal an incomprehension of that critique, even as he expresses a deep respect for the former. At the same time, there is an equalization in the uncle’s words between Communist political subjectivity and masculinity, in which there is no place for Chhobi to carve out a space for herself.
Like the men of her uncle’s commentary, Chhobi, too, could rarely be found inside the home. As her mother observes, “Chhobi! Chhobi! You could call to your heart’s content, but you wouldn’t find her at home, she would have slipped out when no one was looking.” This spatial absence from the home space is coupled with a concomitant development in her subjectivity. As Chhobi’s grandfather, Dakshinaranjan, the family patriarch, also could not help observing, that “everyone in the house still trembled when he raised his voice. Everyone, except that daughter of Kulada.” What the novel documents is a complicated two-pronged gender politics. On the one hand, Chhobi must de-gender herself in order to challenge the demands of her feudal family and society. This needs to be done by debunking the obligatory spatial relationship between the home and women. Chhobi’s self-fashioning as a disobedient woman relies on recurrent departures from her designated belonging within the domestic space, combined with a performative nonchalance towards accepted familial authority.
This strategy of de-gendering is also accompanied by a gendering of Communist practices. Indeed, Chhobi’s own efforts to create transgressive geographies for herself far exceed the Party’s male leadership’s political and strategic blueprint.
The Relief Kitchen: Locus of Chhobi’s Political Labour
The relief kitchen is more than just a place where food is served to the famished. An old and derelict house at the edge of the village has been cleaned up for the purpose, and within that house, two rooms are used as a hospital, one as a classroom, one as a political workshop for villagers, and only one as a kitchen. The labour of place-making that happens in the relief kitchens is undertaken primarily by women activists like Chhobi, and consists of cooking the gruel for the famished, organizing them politically, and nursing the ailing. The activist labour of the relief kitchen thus involves forms of affective labour inextricably linked to spaces of political mobilization and spaces of material refuge for famine-affected peasants.
Tamal notes the work of cooking the gruel in the relief kitchen in huge clay ovens has made Chhobi’s eyes excessively red. Chhobi herself notes the pain in her eyes makes it impossible for her to sleep for many successive nights. In other words, if the labour in her family’s kitchen has transformed the bodies of Chhobi’s mother and aunts, the culinary labour in the Party’s relief kitchen transforms Chhobi’s body in a similar fashion. The Party’s relief kitchen does not so much transform the nature of the labour for women, as transport feminized domestic labour into the public sphere, thus giving birth to what I would call an unstable cult of “public domesticity”, which interpellates class and gender in complicated ways.
To the impoverished peasants who come to the relief kitchen for food, this space signifies more than just food. “They all came to the relief kitchen”, Chhobi observes, “as though it was an island in the midst of floods. They sat down to eat there every day, leaving a part of themselves back home. It was as though they had torn their hearts out and left them there, under the sagging roofs, the broken walls and in the dark corners of their huts with lamps unlit for want of oil.” The work that Chhobi and the other women activists perform is “restless” emotional labour. It is “restless” because, as Chhobi recognizes, the relief kitchen is acutely inadequate in face of the enormity of the famine, and because even as she keeps doing this work, she is not sure what it will yield. Yet she keeps doing it because of its urgency. “She did not have,” the narrative tells us, “the time to think of all that these days.” In other words, Chhobi’s own struggle for individuality pales next to the enormity of the famine and the urgent need to keep the kitchen going.
By meticulously documenting Chhobi’s work in the relief kitchen, the novel directs our attention to the fact that the same work that had earlier seemed to Chhobi as the kind that dwarf women, within the spaces of the relief kitchen, becomes radical political work. As Tamal remarks to Chhobi, “Now why this sudden love for the kitchen?” (203). Uttered as a joke to Chhobi, Tamal’s retort, nonetheless, reverberates as a larger political subtext for the left politics of the era.
Historically, this was the moment the kitchen emerged as an important trope in the Party’s rhetoric. A 1943 article published in the Party organ, People’s War, states, “Just as ‘National Crisis is a crisis in the Kitchen’, so is National unity yet in embryo, a unity in and for the Kitchen.” The family becomes a political trope, whose destruction is imminent due to the war-time food crisis. The kitchen – that crucial site of domestic food production — becomes the space where this destruction is materialized. In contrast to nationalist politics, which represents the home as an abstract, idyllic space, the home is depicted as a material space, embodied most acutely in the kitchen as a site of domestic labour, production and sustenance.
Yet there is also a larger political issue the article invokes – the political unity of the warring “nationalist” political organizations such as Congress, the Muslim League, and other stakeholders. Ania Loomba comments, “Here ‘Kitchen’ does not refer to a space within the home but rather, the food committees, the political actions for food, and the public kitchens in which starving people were fed.” While the kitchen in this article has been de-privatized, its public politics is interpreted in terms of a simultaneous “national crisis” and “national unity” — a political rhetoric which betrays an uncanny affinity with the nationalist politics of familializing the nation and nationalizing the family. This ambivalence between “crisis” and “unity” – both predicated upon the abstract body of the nation – also renders invisible women’s culinary labour within the privatized kitchen of the home, not to mention within the public relief kitchens of the food committees. While Nabankur implicitly critiques such Party theorizations by making women’s labour within both spaces visible, its overt critique of the gender politics of such “public domesticity” remains absent.
Part of this absence is due to the fact that the relief kitchens – the space where public domesticity is predominantly housed and performed – confront the more traditional notions of family and domesticity in crucial ways. As the police-officer points out to Tamal, “And how about her? I am referring to Miss Ray. She comes from such a prestigious family. Is it wise for her to go about the villages?” There is a collusion between the colonial state and the family here, a collusion founded on the intersection of classed authority, respectability and gendered honour, which is predicated on the naturalized and compulsive association of femininity and domestic space. Consider the scene where Chhobi’s grandfather comes to the relief kitchen to take her back home:
Suddenly, in the midst of that silence a very unpleasant thing happened. Dakshinaranjan himself came to take Chhobi home. Ray Karta’s servant, Manik, had brought him over in their boat. Dakshina carried a thin whip in his hand, but he said in a quiet voice, ‘Come home with me. You’ve had enough fussing with these riffraff. No more. Show me other respectable woman who comes here the way you do!’
‘So what if no one else comes to the kitchen? Does that mean I can’t either?’ Chhobi replied.
‘Women should not get involved in all this. Besides, you must think of your family honour. This is unheard of in our family. All this nonsense may be all right in the towns.’
‘I was studying in the town, but you didn’t allow me to continue.’
Dakshinaranjan had planned to take Chhobi home by treating her gently. He didn’t want to lose his temper and make an angry scene, so he had first taken Chhobi aside, and begun speaking to her in a low tone. But now his patience was running out, and anger crept into his voice, ‘A woman’s work is to tend the household, she has no business with scholarship, nor with politics. Do you know what a bad name our family has got because of you? Do you realize how this might affect your father’s business?’
Chhobi knew all this– so she kept quiet. Dakshina said, “Aren’t you coming?’
Suddenly Chhobi decided to speak up, ‘No, I am not going. I still have a lot of work to do.’
When Dashinaranjan walks into the relief kitchen to take his grand-daughter Chhobi back home, the subtext of the confrontation is class, something named obliquely through the term “riff-raff.” Class, much like the police officer’s retort, is a category that exists in intersection with ideologies of ideal feudal rurality, respectability, familial honour and femininity. Sexuality, like class, is only hinted at, never enunciated.
For Chhobi’s grandfather, the public spaces of the left movement are dangerous precisely because they facilitate a form of cross-class intimacy beyond the classed interactions of the master-servant relationship of a feudal household. He expresses the dominant view of the contemporary society of the time, which often dubbed Communist women “licentious” or “sexually promiscuous.” As Loomba writes, “It is easy to overlook the hostility or sheer incomprehension communist women encountered in the 1940s and 1950s. When they went out trying to recruit middle-class women, they were told, ‘This is a respectable family. Our women won’t talk to you.’” Loomba continues, “[…] although communist women shared many of the culturally dominant notions about appropriate modes of gendered behaviour, they also fought hard to dismantle such attitudes and to carve out a new political space for themselves and other women.”
In Nabankur, the relief-kitchen is the fulcrum of a political place-making. Chhobi’s refusal to accompany her grandfather becomes a key moment of this latter. The “public domesticity” espoused by the Party provided a strategic material and discursive space from which to construct this transgressive geography. By participating in this public domesticity, Chhobi constructed her own version of a disobedient femininity, one predicated on a radical disavowal of and distancing from traditional domesticity. Place-making labour and disobedient femininity are thus inextricably linked to each other.
This defiance of traditional domesticity comes with its own challenges. For example, Chhobi’s political work involves a cost for her family, i.e. because of her political convictions, her father’s business suffers. Chhobi is uncomfortably aware of this reality, yet refuses to quit her political activism. Chhobi’s self-fashioning is a form of political ethicalism that prioritizes something other than the self-interest – financial or otherwise – of her biological family. This prioritization is, of course, an attempt to break free of the subordination of women to the patriarchal family. But there is also a yearning for a political, ethical subjectivity that transcends gendered familialism, while acknowledging its structural importance in women’s lives. This complex yearning, I argue, is what the novel names as a female Communist subjectivity.
Conclusion
Soma Marik points out, one of the challenges of working on the gender politics of the 1940s Bengali left is the fact that for many political autobiographies and accounts, even those written by women, “so-called personal issues were filtered out and patriarchy entirely subsumed under feudalism.” Nabankur avoids this subsumption, by employing the language of the personal and individual. For example, in the confrontation between Chhobi and her mentioned in the preceding section, Dakshinaranjan’s views bespeak an “old world” feudal certainty that encompasses familial relationships, gender, class and political history.
In contrast, Chhobi does not provide any full-blown arguments. Instead, her utterances are fragmented and brief and her tone accusatory, couched in questions and absolute rejections. While rejecting her grandfather’s demands, Chhobi’s response embodies the symbolic silences of a subjectivity in flux, and in the process of finding a form for itself. In contrast to her grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins and friends, Chhobi — the “seedling” which the title of the novel refers to — creates a new femininity that can only find expression in the left movement of the time. However, this new femininity does not yet have a definitive form or its own language. It knows how to ask questions, but the answers to its questions remain unformed. The space Chhobi inhabits is that of a utopian possibility yet to be realized.
Bengal’s colonial modernity, as many scholars have shown, ushered in a different model of womanhood. Often described as the bhadramahila (genteel lady) and nabina (the new woman), this new womanhood enshrined the bourgeois ideals of femininity. Often defined against the older feudal norms of femininity embodied in the word prachina (the old woman), the figure of the bhadramahila has been a contentious figure in nationalist discourse. Consequently, many of the conversations within twentieth century Bengali literary public sphere, especially academic studies, have focused on the gendered formation of nationalism in Bengal and on the binary opposition between “prachina” and “nabina.”
Nabankur debunks such a dichotomy, and suggests a womanhood that cannot be reduced to the prachina or the bhadramahila. As Marik reminds us, “[…] the women in Bengal made an effort to break out of their bhadramahila roles. The way in which these women participated in the CPI and in mass activism broke most bhadralok codes of conduct for women […] For the communist women, the family ceased to be the sole or even the necessary site within which their political work could be structured.” Nabankur dramatizes that process. In doing so, the novel registers the double burden of the self-fashioning of the Communist women of the era – the tension between the search for one’s own dignity as a woman, and one’s political work towards a broader liberatory agenda. Establishing personal dignity as a woman requires impressing upon one’s social world one’s identity as an individual, whereas political work requires a conscious relinquishment of one’s status as an individual. For Chhobi, the relief kitchen is the space where these two contradictory political impulses temporarily converge. In doing so, the relief kitchen engenders a new form of femininity, a utopian space whose significance for the radical gender movements of India and Bengal have yet to be fully appreciated.
Com. Nandini Dhar is a Marxist Feminist, Author and Independent Media Activist
